this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Cosmic Horror

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A community to discuss Cosmic Horror in it's many forms; books, films, comics, art, TV, music, RPGs, video games etc.

"cosmic horror... is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock... themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries... the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale..."

For more Lovecraft & Mythos-inspired Cosmic Horror:-!lovecraft_mythos@lemmy.world

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Five Books to Get You Started in Weird Fiction and Cosmic Horror (the-line-up.com)
submitted 1 week ago by ekZepp@lemmy.world to c/cosmichorror@lemm.ee
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As readers and writers, there are many immediate images that we conjure when imagining the weird tale.

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer from their site Weird Fiction Review give an excellent overview and definition of the Weird and by association the weird tale:

“As a twentieth and twenty-first-century art form, the story of The Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework but also of the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions, some only peripherally connected to the fantastic.” (...)

Books suggested:

  • The King in Yellow By Robert W. Chambers

  • Zothique: The Final Cycle - By Clark Ashton Smith

  • The Great God Pan By Arthur Machen

  • The House on the Borderland By William Hope Hodgson

  • The Horla and Others By Guy de Maupassant

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